Web giants YouTube , Facebook , Twitter and Microsoft will step up efforts to remove extremist content from their websites by creating a common database.

The companies will share ‘hashes’ – unique digital fingerprints they automatically assign to videos or photos – of extremist content they have removed from their websites to enable their peers to identify the same content on their platforms.

…YouTube and Facebook have begun to use hashes to automatically remove extremist content.

This is occurring because of pressure from the EU and US to remove both “fake news” and “extremist content” because it is allowing the “populist” — read: realists who have observed the failure of Leftism — revolt to boil over in opposition to the cadre of elites who promote each other, ensuring that they always win. The EU has been pushing for big social to remove “hate speech”, which shows us that “extremist content” means non-Leftist content and not, for example, jihadi propaganda:

If the Silicon Valley companies do not speed up their response to tackling illegal hate speech on their platforms, they will be be held accountable under European law, the Commission said Sunday.

Back in May, the companies all voluntarily signed up to a code of conduct, in which they promised to remove hate speech within 24 hours of it being posted and to promote counter-narratives. The code arose from concerns about a proliferation of hate speech on the platforms following a spate of terror attacks in Europe and amid the refugee crisis.

…”If Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft want to convince me and the ministers that the non-legislative approach can work, they will have to act quickly and make a strong effort in the coming months,” she told the Financial Times.

When this database is created, it will undoubtedly include “fake news” from sites other than those which repeat the Party line. As some have pointed out, this is obvious censorship by collusion:

What the left is trying to do is designate anything outside its ideological bubble as suspect on its face.

In October, President Obama complained that we need a “curating function” to deal with the “wild-wild-west-of-information flow.” Who would be doing this “curating” is unclear — but we can guess: “Obviously,” Noah Feldman writes at Bloomberg View, “it would be better if the market would fix the problem on its own . . . But if they can’t reliably do it — and that seems possible, since algorithms aren’t (yet) fact-checkers — there might be a need for the state to step in.”

In other words, censorship.

In reality, this will shake out this way: some sites will be designated fake and some content designated extremist. Those who post either will find themselves shadowbanned on the big sites. In this way, the average person will see nothing but content from the Left-leaning mainstream media and be forced to conclude that no alternative exists.